Psychological nominalism and the space of reasons: is all awareness of universals, abstract entities, and sense-qualities mediated by language, and is knowledge placement in the normative logical space of justification rather than a natural-causal relation?

Wilfrid Sellars, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Psychological nominalism holds that all awareness of universals, classes, abstract entities, sense-qualities, and categories generally is mediated by language and conceptual placement.1 There is no pre-linguistic awareness of abstract entities; the framework within which abstract entities have whatever standing they have is a linguistic-conceptual framework, learned developmentally and embedded in intersubjective practices.

The space of reasons (EPM §36) is the normative logical space of justification within which knowledge claims are located; placing a state as a state of knowing is doing normative work that no natural-causal description can do alone. The two positions are complementary: nominalism on the side of awareness, space- of-reasons on the side of knowledge.

Both are developed against classical realism about universals (Platonism, moderate realism) and against the foundationalist project that the Given was supposed to ground.2

Sources

  1. Do they point to a conception of these statements which safeguard psychological nominalism? Or do they leave the door open to Platonistic metaphysics?
    PART THREE EMPIRICISM AND ABSTRACT ENTITIES, p. 256
  2. And while we have made some progress in this direction, more remains to be done. We saw above that only the most specific statements about what a person believes, desires, expects, etc., can be made without using the common sense equivalents of "There is a proposition such that... " "There is a quality such that...," etc.
    PART THREE EMPIRICISM AND ABSTRACT ENTITIES, p. 261

Where the argument is made

  • Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (EPM, 1956) §29-§38 — the canonical statement of psychological nominalism and the space of reasons
  • "Abstract Entities" (AE, 1963 in Philosophical Perspectives) — the developed treatment of abstract entities
  • "On the Introduction of Abstract Entities" (IAE, 1975)
  • "Grammar and Existence: A Preface to Ontology" (GE, 1960 in Science, Perception and Reality)
  • "Naming and Saying" (NS, 1962 in Science, Perception and Reality)
  • "Meaning as Functional Classification" (MFC, 1974)
  • Naturalism and Ontology (NAO, 1980) for the late ontological treatment
  • Kant and pre-Kantian Themes (Amaral ed., 2002) for the lecture treatment of nominalism in Kant

How the argument was received

settled-as-articulated